Microsoft Quits CES

Microsoft, the technology czar of business, will not attend CES after this year’s show. I, for one, will miss the tech giant’s additions to the frantic show. But the move does make sense.

To say that technology happens fast would be an understatement. The first dual-core smartphone was released in February of this year, and the first quad-core (technically penta-core, thanks to a lower power companion core) smartphones are expected to arrive February of this year. When technology experiences a full life cycle in a single year, you know things are moving quick.

Which is why saving your announcements for a single tech show in January is a bad idea. Microsoft has released plenty of killer things over the last year, and saving them until now would have just been foolish.

Note that I’m not saying that CES is bad for companies. If a company happens to have a product nearing completion around CES, then it still is a great place to show the hardware off. And it give an excellent way to show off your experimental, next generation wares that may or may not ever make it into production. And what other time do you see so much news coverage dedicated solely to technology and consumer electronics? CES gets people very excited (me included. Hopefully, with the help of you, the reader, Fellow Geek will be big enough that we can send our own journalists to the bonanza) in a way that you don’t see very often.

But it isn’t a critical event anymore. The internet makes a far better and far cheaper distribution channel for information on new gizmos than any tradeshow could ever be.

But they usually try and keep the wraps on hardware and software prototypes outside of CES. The conference marks the one time when every company shows off their newest and greatest experimental hardware. And that is something I will miss from Microsoft.